Wednesday, 12 August 2015

This here is my second day of bashing my head against a Heisenbug whereby a program happily writes 18 pages to a serial EEPROM, but on the 19th page it gets drunk and takes the rest of the day off. It's definitely a Heisenbug, because connecting a protocol analyzer (but not an oscilloscope) makes everything work as it should.

This leads me to ponder alternative career options. Here's one:

New e-commerce concept: make sacrifices on line! Choose a meat from the Temple's approved list, and pay for it by any convenient means, plus a small monetary donation to the Temple. The High Priest then nips down to the butcher shop, buys the meat, takes it back to the Temple, sets it on the ceremonial hibachi to send its essence up to Offler on your behalf, then disposes of the worldly remnant in the approved manner.

...If someone sacrificed a whole pig, we might need a lot of priests, acolytes, and neighbors to aid with disposal of the remnant....

And you just know some wag will want to sacrifice a zeeba to Offler, so it's best to have access to a specialty butcher.

Wednesday, 01 April 2015

I didn't bother reading the contents. I assume they want me to send $20 for more information.

Kind of like the Dispos-A-Dime machine, scaled up 200 times!

I can't find anything on-line about the Dispos-A-Dime. 'Twas in a daily-paper comic strip, many years past. Frank & Ernest, maybe? The thing looked like a vending machine, and had a coin slot and a sign: Dispos-A-Dime Deposit 10¢

Monday, 16 February 2015

Monday, 09 February 2015

Out walkies this morning, I incautiously went too near the farm fence (the farm being closed to the public on Mondays, and the two-legged staff being prone to late arrival, especially on drizzlesome mornings such as this).

The Dread Guardian of the Farm pounced! From her lurking spot on the fence onto the back of my neck!

Oops, that came out a bit blurry, as action shots will. Let's try again.

Yeah, that captures the moment a bit better.

Darn critter kept trying to rub my head off. I eventually managed to dislodge her, back onto the cold, damp fence.

A bit later, someone came along and opened the office and presumably let her in and fed her.

Wednesday, 14 January 2015

Would a big tribble, the color of Admiral Kirk's hairpiece and equipped with ear-warming flaps, be an Ushatner? (And if it leaked a controlled amount of heat from head to ambient via a thermoelectric module, it could squirrel away energy to be emitted as a "coo" whenever enough was stored! Or... hm. External thermoelectric module with one side exposed and the other insulated. Cools down outdoors, then generates coo-power as it warms up indoors!)

Two other random-but-somewhat-serious ideas showed up this morning; one relates to a currently-dormant project for a client and appears to be not immediately useful (but worth filing away), and the other is utterly pointless but might become a product anyway, because fun-fun-silly-willy, and anyway it's sometimes worth putting a few days and a hundred bucks or so into R&D just to see if something will sell.